Among the exquisite details in a recent New Yorker feature on the collapse of Sir Allen Stanford's empire is the scene in Miami when a witness to discussions about where all the money went in an alleged $8bn (£5.5bn) fraud "of shocking magnitude" broke down and wept, and one of Stanford's lawyers "suggested they begin to pray together".

It would take a Tom Wolfe to do full justice to this image. The England and Wales Cricket Board would join the tearful huddle as victims and alleged perpetrators came together as one to pray for God's mercy to shine down on all his children: not only those wondering whether their savings were torched on a Twenty20 cricket tournament, but also those now unable to explain to the US Securities and Exchange Commission where the eight billion bucks might be located. Lord, show us the light.

Sport's genius for making un-people of those who wreck the script is unmatched. We can say, for example, that Alan Pardew will not be seen on Match of the Day 2 for a while after he casually observed that Michael Essien had "absolutely raped" an opponent.

In cricket, Stanford has been snipped from the frame by embarrassment's clippersut he is still out there. Boy, is he still out there: the ghost of every sordid sponsorship deal yet to come, the phantom in the room of due diligence and a chopper-riding egomaniac's "ability to pay".

Called for a reaction by the New Yorker reporter, Alec Wilkinson, Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, was sticking to the hindsight defence. "There's an awful lot of being wise after the event," he said. "In the end, sporting organisations take what they can get from sponsors – and it's not easy to get."

There's your problem right there, except that Clarke neglected to say that sporting organisations also "take what they can get" from television companies, kit manufactures, bookmakers and "elite partners", which is why umpires and referees, who are meant to embody impartiality, are now smothered in commercial logos.

In cricket, as in society, nobody looked for warning signs in the boom years because no one wanted to see any. Life had become the Las Vegas strip. Wilkinson, though, decided to investigate Stanford's claim that he had been to Baylor University on an "athletic scholarship" and "tore my rotator cuff and broke my collarbone as a quarterback."

If only. The New Yorker tells us: "Baylor has no record of Stanford's receiving a football scholarship." A college spokesman informs them by email: "I haven't been able to find anyone who was associated with the team during those years who can recall him as a player."

Even as Antigua's president, Baldwin Spencer, was accusing Stanford of "threats, innuendos, and now downright interference in our nation's affairs", cricket genuflected. One perverse outcome of Stanford's gymnastic money management is that he has spent $60m-$75m on the sport in the West Indies, which cricket, presumably, will never have to pay back.

In the current festival of fraud, proven and alleged, nothing will beat "Madoff" as a surname for someone who legged it with other people's money. So far only one member of the Stanford team is facing criminal prosecution, while the Texan tycoon, who has pleaded the Fifth, is still only on a civil charge by the SEC, who raided his Houston headquarters with the help of US marshals and agents in Chevy Suburbans and GMC pickups, while colleagues were posted to nearby rooftops.

How sweet it would have been to predict all this to Giles Clarke as the Big Man arrived at Lord's by helicopter, with a case supposedly containing $20m in notes. Photographs from that day provide a wide-eyed record of sport's greatest Faustian pact: the day a soul was sold to a chancer who disdained Test cricket but saw Twenty20 as a chance to bounce a Wag on his knee in some weird messianic scheme to become a Caribbean God.

The writer Jamaica Kincaid tells Wilkinson: "In Antigua there's always a man, a person who comes from the rest of the world – a pirate. Piracy is very close to Antiguan history. They've been coming and hiding money and stealing for hundreds of years. This man comes to Antigua and corrupts the place, and everybody's happy because they're making money."

Wilkinson's pursuit of this astounding story elicits only silence from the Stanford camp, until one of his representatives finally writes, in an email: "I am so, so sorry, and so embarrassed." He should try sport's tactic, and pretend it never happened. Or just pray.